In an idle moment, in the autumn of his years, Max Hooper googled his name and discovered that, along with a couple of Australians (one a politician, the other a champion croquet player), the search summoned hundreds of sites about hedges.

He was quietly pleased but also surprised, because it had been 40 years since he had come up with what he had wryly called “Hooper’s Hedgerow History Hypothesis” and he had never imagined the thing would still be going strong. Yet over the years his formula (age of the hedge = no of species x 100) had become to naturalists what E=mc2 was to physicists, a thing of beauty that not only worked, but seemingly could not be improved upon. It was considered so…

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